Nvidia Shows Face Works Video Capture Tech Demo

Well now, it seems like you can’t claim to be in the business of next-gen technology these days until you’ve wheeled out a giant floating man-face. And yes, that's obviously due to the incredible challenges it takes to simulate a real 'life' head. Nvidia has now shown their own real-time face technology at their GPU Technology Conference in California. Check out the very impressive video after the break.

Face Works uses a face and motion capture technology developed at the University of Southern California’s Institute of Creative Technology (ICT). The Light Stage technology is able to capture data to within a tenth of a millimetre using photographic techniques that capture the geometry of an actor’s face as well as the light transmission through human skin and the reflections that come from the oils too. As well as the still images the Light Stage then uses video capturing to grab around thirty different facial expressions from the actor involved. Once all that information is captured it’s then compressed down to a set of meshes that can be used to recreate and animate a digitised version of that face.

Nvidia have worked with the ICT and managed to get this compressed data down from the 32GB it is in its raw form to around 400MB. At that size it is now possible to do the animation in real time and that is exactly what Jen-Hsun Huang has going on behind him on stage in the video below.

The demo is running a GTX Titan pretty hard, demanding around 2TFLOPS of processing power, around half the possible performance of the ultra-enthusiast GPU. It’s perhaps telling that the Face works tech is being demoed using a bald man – matching it with some proper follicle rendering technology would likely bring even the GTX Titan to its knees. Hmmm ... TressFX anyone ?

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#4558521 Posted on: 03/20/2013 07:41 PM
Neat stuff. You could even see the light through the top of his ear like you would in real life. So far the best face in a game would have to be Psycho's face in Crysis 3. It's like looking at a real person speaking and showing emotion. I vote Psycho for best animated face.

remixedcat
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#4558566 Posted on: 03/20/2013 08:43 PM
Oh hells yeah!

Mato87
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#4558588 Posted on: 03/20/2013 09:14 PM

Neat stuff. You could even see the light through the top of his ear like you would in real life. So far the best face in a game would have to be Psycho's face in Crysis 3. It's like looking at a real person speaking and showing emotion. I vote Psycho for best animated face.

indeed but I thought that Karl Rasch's face in C3 was very detailed and beautifuly animated too

NAMEk
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#4558616 Posted on: 03/20/2013 09:55 PM
That's just amazing.

CPC_RedDawn
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#4558627 Posted on: 03/20/2013 10:11 PM
Around 2terflops of power needed for just one face and thats only half the power of the TITAN.

And the PS4 has around just a little less than 2teraflops of power.... PS4 just got owned!

WhiteLightning
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#4558630 Posted on: 03/20/2013 10:20 PM
looks great. looking forward to see this in games in 2025

Its impressive for a console, but honestly I think the Nvidia Human Head Demo from back in 2006 looks just as good and that does not even have any animations. In the PS4 demo when the lighting lights up the face you can see that it is nowhere near as detailed as this new human head demo. The animations are good but the textures look crappy when lit up plus the eye textures look pretty low res too compared to the rest of the face. This new demo from Nvidia looks a lot better imo. Plus this is only using HALF of the TITAN. How much do you reckon that face demo is using of the PS4? Because I am certain that the PS4 with its specs can not render that much detail on a face in an actual game world with everything else on screen too.

Demo.
(Geforce 670 or above recommended, seems it works on older hardware like the 400 series though with a much lower framerate.)

Lifelike Human Face RenderingMeet "Digital Ira". Ira represents a big leap forward in capturing and rendering human facial expression in real time, and gives us a glimpse of the realism we can look forward to in our favorite game characters.

This demonstration highlights the state of the art in performance capture. All Ira''s motions were acted out in a "light stage" at the Institute for Creative Technology at USC. The team there headed by Dr. Paul Debevec is able to photographically capture facial geometry, surface detail, and lighting information of an actor without any of the traditional tricks of face markers or special makeup.

This light stage data is pulled into NVIDIA''s demo engine, and using FaceWorks rendering technology we witness a realism of human facial rendering never before seen in real time. FaceWorks shading gives Ira lifelike skin, eyes, lips and teeth. Adaptive tessellation keeps the curves of his face perfectly smooth.

Play with this interactive demo to see Ira immersed in three different lighting environments. Adjust his skin rendering to see the effect of sub surface light transmission through his skin. And, see the realism of his facial motion as he stares you down with a myriad of lifelike expresssions.

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